One Pair Of Eyes

A generation of Communist rule changes many things - but not the real character of the people. George Mikes, writer, humorist, and traveller, left his native country in 1938 and settled in London. Since then he has gone back three times, including a visit in 1956 when he wrote a first-hand account of the unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Communist regime. In tonight's film the author of How To Be an Alien returns to look at today's Hungary in his own idiosyncratic way.

Mai Zetterling gives her own provocative views on the world as she sees it - views on marriage, on the pressures of contemporary society, on women and on her own attempts to live without compromising. This is a film about the making of a film - a short film Mai Zetterling has directed expressly for this programme in which she states her belief in what she calls "an awareness of life". In it the husband and wife are acted by her close friends the actor Joss Ackland and his real wife Rose Mary.

"Pessimism about the future is very fashionable - and very profitable. But if I could have any period of history to live in, I would choose to be living right now". So says John Crosby, the Observer columnist, who belongs to that long list of celebrated Americans who have settled in Britain. In this film Crosby tries to bring a spark of common sense to what he regards as the current hysterias about pollution, over-population, world food shortages and other sacred subjects.

Headmaster of Lancing when he was only 33, now headmaster of Marlborough, John Dancy "believes a public school can only be successful if it offers its pupils a vision - a vision of something they can live by, or aspire to". In his One Pair of Eyes John Dancy, one of Britain's most progressive public school heads, shows how he is trying to achieve his aims at Marlborough - a public school where there is no fagging or beating, where a small number of girls are admitted, and where the old games-playing traditions of "muscular Christianity" have no part in his concept of what a school community ought to be. Dancy's vision of understanding comes from a mixture of Greek and Christian ideals - in the words of one of his favourite quotations: "To Christ we owe compassion, to the Greeks everything else".

Up to the beginning of this year, 30-year-old Des Wilson was the director of Shelter, the charity which has done so much to draw attention to the homeless and their needs. Now an Observer columnist, he looks back on his four years of charity work. He examines the role of charities in Britain today and asks: Are we really a charitable society? He maintains that we treat our charities as a substitute for the Welfare State. As a nation we give over £50-million a year to charity, but is financial generosity enough? In this film he talks, among others, to Richard Crossman MP, former Minister of Health and Social Security, and to James Loring, director of Britain's largest charity - the Spastics Society.

Anthony Grey was the Reuters correspondent in Peking at the height of China's Cultural Revolution. He was arrested by the Chinese Government, as a political hostage, and held prisoner for 806 days. "Two years of solitary confinement in China might seem to be a destructive and negative experience. Now perhaps the elusive positive aspects are becoming clearer in my mind. Undoubtedly my views of what is important in life have been radically affected by what happened to me". In this film Anthony Grey draws on his experience of Peking, and an earlier assignment in Berlin, to explore what it means to be a free individual; and discusses with a number of people, among them Michael Stewart, MP, and Arthur Koestler, some of the political and social forces that can put an individual's freedom at risk.

Himself of Afrikaans origin, and as a young man one of the first to oppose racialism in South Africa, writer and explorer Laurens van der Post has long sought to discover the causes at the heart of racial prejudice. In this film he goes on a journey of rediscovery to South Africa and elsewhere. But his journey is also an inward one, to the dark places of the human mind. The conclusions he reaches challenge our whole way of looking at racial prejudice.

This weekend, between 8,000 and 10,000 people each day will visit Lord Montagu's-home at Beaulieu in Hampshire. Is this taking commercialisation too far? Would it not be more dignified for a stately home owner who cannot afford to maintain his house to hand it over to the nation? In this film Lord Montagu puts the case for private ownership. 'Our historic houses must above all remain as family homes, not museums.' He looks at the situation in France, where the chateaux so often stand 'as dead mausoleums of a bygone age,' and visits other stately homes in Britain. He also gets forthright comments from some Oxford students and a group of car workers at Cowley.

In this personally authored documentary, John Braine, who is probably best remembered for his first novel, Room at the Top, discusses his work and the beliefs that inform it. Braine takes us from his childhood in Bradford to his present home in leafy Surrey and also shares his growing convictions about the importance of stability in society and the urgent need to avoid either revolution or drastic political reform.

Starting from zero, says Leonardo Ricci, 'is the point every man should arrive at. A man is a man when he finds himself alone and has to survive.' Ricci is an Italian architect, painter and urban planner. During the Second World War he saw communes rise spontaneously amidst the devastation in Sicily. Ever since he has worked to produce a radically new architecture, one which encourages a communal city life, and which also allows everyone to live within easy reach of the countryside. The programme was filmed in Sicily and Florence, his home city.